Tesco’s crisis
A hard rain
That was a killer mistake, given the threat that Tesco and other conventional supermarkets, from America to Australia, face from “hard discounters”, which sell food far more cheaply without compromising on quality. The most fearsome are a family-owned, publicity-shy trio from Germany: Lidl and two firms called Aldi, which separated to form northern and southern branches in 1960.
In Europe the sales of discount grocers (including those of a softer sort, like Penny Markt of Germany and Dia of Spain) will grow at a rate of 4.8% a year until 2017, predicts Kantar Retail, a market-research firm. Those of conventional supermarkets will rise at a rate of just 3.1%. The difference sounds small, but soon adds up: by 2017 discounters will have almost one-fifth of the European market.
The hard discounters grow fastest where their sort of retailing is least developed. In Britain the sales of Aldi and Lidl jumped 29.1% and 17.7% respectively between the 12 weeks to September 15th 2013 and the same period this year. Tesco’s British sales meanwhile dropped 4.5%. Whatever the motives behind its miscounting of revenues, it had the effect of disguising how much Tesco was having to sacrifice profits to limit the decline in sales.
Hard discounters differ from standard supermarkets in several important ways. They typically stock fewer than 2,000 products rather than the 40,000 or so in a big, conventional supermarket. Most are own-label rather than the manufacturers’ heavily advertised brands. They arrive at the shops in “shelf-ready” packaging, which avoids laborious stacking. Discounters shun the special offers that supermarkets and their suppliers use to boost sales (and that were the reason for the rebates that Tesco miscounted). Instead, they sell at consistently low prices, which in Britain are about a fifth lower than those of their mainstream competitors.